I and a lot of other people I know work bloody hard to promote exactly the sort of music you want. Don't you realise how gratuitously offensive you are being when you sieze on bizarre isolated incidents like The Great Pretender to condemn ALL UK folk clubs as moribund? I take umbrage at that.
Bryan,
I spent thirty odd years in the clubs. I watched and one by one they fell off the tree; saw hundreds of bad performances, which previously would not have been tolerated by club audiences, gradually become accepted, defended then preferred because "the folk didn't have standards so why should we?" or "the old singers sang anything so what does it matter?"
Neither of these statements are in any way true, both standards and discrimination were paramount to many of the singers we met - we recorded hours of them saying so.
If a singer has an off night - tough - it's happened to all of us, he/she'll probably do better next time. If they start having regular off nights, it's obvious to me that they need to do some work. If they, their fellow performers start to argue that it doesn't matter, then bad singing becomes the norm. If it is further argued that it doesn't matter because it's only a bit of fun anyway - the important thing is to sing and bugger the standards - you've dropped the ball, and in doing so, you have been "gratuitously offensive" to the singers who gave us our raw material.
These are not isolated incidents of a bygone era. They drove me out of most of the clubs I frequented on a regular basis. The last two clubs I attended in the UK (last year and the year before) were just as I have described - even worse in the case of one of them which I know to have been running for at least 25 years. I hear the attitude not only defended, but promoted on this forum regularly - take a look at some of the 'are standards necessary' threads.
Couple this situation with a thread like this where I should "give it a break" when I say I expect some vague idea of what I am going to hear when I attend a folk club, and you've got a bloody mess.
Sure, I can phone in advance to find out if the local folk club caters for people who like folk music - I can phone the grocer's shop in Galway to find out if the cheese they are advertising is real cheese and not that plastic shit that comes in airtight containers. I SHOULDN'T BLOODY HAVE TO